Apple throws out the rulebook for its unique next-gen Mac Pro

Apple on Monday offered an uncharacteristic sneak peek of its forthcoming Mac Pro, which after years of being largely ignored has received a radical new design crammed with state-of-the-art hardware technology.

The most striking feature of the new Mac Pro is the cylindrical chassis wrapped in a black aluminum shell. Adding to the unique design is the size of the unit, which measures only 9.9-inches tall with a diameter of 6.6-inches.The new Mac Pro is one-eighth the volume of the outgoing tower style model.

Past the aesthetics lies a completely reimagined interior. All major components and boards in the Mac Pro are mounted to a triangular heat sink, which Apple is calling the "unified thermal core." According to the company, the use of the extruded aluminum structure was key in achieving such a compact design.

Heat is conducted away from the CPUs and GPUs and dispersed evenly across the surface of the thermal core. This allows for a single fan, situated at the top of the unit, to suck air up through an intake at the bottom of the computer, with exhaust flowing out vertically above the cylinder.

Screenshot of thermal core structure animation.

As for silicon, Apple chose to stick with Intel's Xeon family of processors, though the next-generation Mac Pro will get next-generation E5 chipsets. Configurations will reportedly be capped at 12 cores, providing enough horsepower to double the floating-point performance of existing models. Along with the new Xeon boards comes support for PCI Express gen 3, which boasts bandwidth up to 40GBps, with 1.25GBps reads and 1.0GBps writes depending on the component loadout.

Mac Pro's configured SSD storage.

In opting for a faster PCIe flash storage solution, which is clocked at 1250MB/s compared to SATA flash's 500MB/s and SATA HDD's 110MB/s, Apple has done away with the drive bays that made swapping HDDs so easy. The company may be hoping Thunderbolt 2-enabled external drives will pick up the slack, but some may be disappointed to see this useful feature go.

On the memory side, Apple is using four-channel ECC DDR3 modules running at 1866 MHz, which affords bandwidth up to 60GB/s. This also doubles the current Mac Pro's capabilities.

Graphics are handled by standard dual workstation-class AMD FirePro GPUs with up to 6GB of dedicated VRAM, which puts up to 70 teraflops of computing power on tap. Current Mac Pros perform at 2.7 teraflops.

Expansion has also been greatly enhanced, with a whopping six Thunderbolt 2 ports, four USB 3.0 ports, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, HDMI 1.4 and audio in/out. Thunderbolt 2 is the main draw here, with the protocol able to support 20Gbps throughput, up to six daisy-chained peripherals per port and backward compatibility with current Thunderbolt hardware. Intel, which developed the I/O standard, recently revealed the official specs of Thunderbolt 2 last week.

While the hardware specs are for the prototype Mac Pro, the production model is expected to be similar if not identical when it sees release this fall.

In previewing the professional-level computer, a rarity for Apple, it is assumed the company wanted to assuage concerns from some pro users who felt neglected after the company built multiple iMac and Mac mini refreshes without offering any major boost to the Mac Pro.

That has to be the worst possible design for a pro machine that I could imagine. Pros don't want cutesy cylinders, they want EXPANSION. Things like slots, lots of RAM slots, lots of PCI Express slots, and multiple hard drive bays, at least 4 of them. Pros still need optical drives. Pros want to be able to upgrade their graphics cards. Pros want multiple processors.

Think about what they could have done with this in the existing case: Dual 12 core processors. Up to 128GB RAM. 2 solid state drives AND 4 hard drives. And two Blu-Ray drives. And 4 PCI Express slots.

And the design is terrible too. This thing looks like a black aluminum can. Oh, wait, that's what it is.

expansion... for the most part, having local HDDs will evolve back to Thunderbolt expansion chassis... this shrinks the chassis,the power supply, and the air/cooling requirements of the base unit... in the Extreme Programming parlance... YAGNI (you aren't going to need (all of) it).
Better to expand as needed.

Also, In a NAS/SAN world, it makes more sense to have one data farm than lots of local storage, so this actually fares well in the corp office environment. For small home pro users, it's a bit of redundancy, but the pay me now (for a larger PS, cooling, chaotic) vs pay me later (thunderbolt chassis, expansion disks, 2nd PS for this unit) pay off is likely in the long run more beneficial for the latter case (net TCO lower, more flexibility, and easier transitioning of a faster compute engine).

PCI board expansion is the biggest thing missing I think, but I'm not in that market, and I don't know if thunderbolt expansion chassis devices will fill the PCI board niche.

Also not noted here is inbox expansion. 'up to 12 cores' may sound nice, but is looks from the outside, it's a BTO option, not a aftermarket add-in card. My guess it's memory and flash disk expansion only, and everything else is soldered on at the (US) factory...

I think it's a great design, consistent with Apple's hardware vision... not necessarily great for your 'old school' iron heads.

Anyone remember the Cube? Hopefully they don't saddle this with a ridiculous price like they did to the cube (RIP). Price for design is not what pros want: they want power. If they premium charge this because of their aesthetic design they are going to see poor sales-through indeed.

The more I read about this new Mac Pro, the more I'm liking it. Sure, there are certain unanswered questions about the ability to upgrade components, but all-in-all, Apple once again paves its own path and throws out the old way of thinking. Technology has advanced so much since the last Mac Pro that one can get twice the horsepower of their fastest Mac Pro in a package that's one-eighth the volume, and make it quieter on top of that. Great piece of engineering.

Thanks to Thunderbolt, it's essentially a fully configurable machine that can be tailored to any kind of power user and not worry about suffering a performance hit with external devices.

I'm looking forward to the reviews of this bad-boy when the machine starts shipping. I hope the professional community embraces this system. I think Apple must have done some kind of research into this area before heading off on such a radical redesign.